Kissinger Center Fellows Travel to Sweden for 2024 Engelsberg Winter Symposium
Attendees of the 2024 Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy Winter Symposium
On December 3rd-6th, fellows from the Henry A. Kissinger Center traveled to Engelsberg, Sweden for The Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy’s 2024 Winter Symposium. These gatherings bring together junior and senior scholars from the Kissinger Center at SAIS, the Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics, King’s College London War Studies Department, and the Stockholm School of Economics’ Centre for Statecraft & Strategic Communication. AJI’s goal is to train and mentor the next generation of historically minded scholars and practitioners in statecraft, diplomacy, and strategy.
The evening of the first day saw a screening of the 1963 film The Leopard and a reflection on its themes of revolution and modernization. The next day saw SAIS Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Elizabeth Hines, moderate a discussion among Dr Mattias Hessérus, Dr Giulia Garbagni (Department of War Studies) and Prof. Brendan Simms (Centre for Geopolitics) on successfully navigating the world of research grants.
The rest of the day involved workshopping works-in-progress, as well as a fireside chat with Prof. John Bew (Department of War Studies). AJI Deputy Director Will Quinn fielded questions about Prof. Bew’s time serving the UK government under four different Prime Ministers during an intense period of change for Britain and Europe.
The next day began with fellows participating in the “Strategists’ Accelerator” led by Prof. Robert Johnson (University of Oxford), a series of exercises in decisionmaking to learn from past conflicts.
They then heard Prof. Francis J. Gavin share ideas from his new book Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2025). Prof. Gavin emphasized the need to avoid the historical profession slipping into irrelevance, while ensuring that historians maintain rigor. At its best, history should help policymakers understand major historical shocks and shifts—from the revolutions of 1989 to 9/11 and beyond—with greater nuance, precedent, and context.
The day concluded with a panel on politics and civil society in wartime Ukraine, with Dr. Alina Polyakova (Center for European Policy Analysis) guiding discussion among Dr Per Ekman (Stockholm School of Economics) and Dr Kseniya Sotnikova (CEPA).
